P.T. Barnum: One Born Every Second

 

Popular culture truly is a strange human phenomenon.  It captures peoples' attention, their imaginations.  They want to be seen as being part of what is current, what is popular, different, totally cool.  They won't be left behind.  In the same token what passes for popular culture encompasses values that are shallow and without much integrity as far as meaningfulness is concerned.

The hysteria created over celebrity, over acts of societal alienation adopted as a means of proving how hip one is, and raising crude lyrics to the status of a religious devotion, of glorifying violence and sexism, and divisions within society in a culture of ignorance, defiant of acquiring education, is nothing if not dreadfully sad.

The media has followed Hollywood in portraying violence as normal to human existence.  Love between two people being nothing exceptional until and unless it is paired with uniquely strange occurrences, inclusive of violence.  Recreational drugs and misuse of alcohol are integral parts of the celebrity culture and enhance the way of life that the cool and the hip gravitate toward.

A popular cult figure in the entertainment field seeks to maximize his already inflated public esteem among his followers by 'designing' footwear, another status symbol hotly sought by the followers of pop fashion.  He is certainly not alone in branching out and initiating a one-man industry to rake in more profits; everyone with any connection to popular culture and celebrity associates their names with perfume, designer clothing, whatever sells.

It is the celebrity of their names that sell the mediocre products.  And the 'rarer' and more 'precious' those items appear in the minds of the purchasers, thanks to the well-oiled machinery of the advertising/public relations industry, the more can be commanded in the purchase price.  Three thousand pairs of the new Nike Air Yeezy IIs (no one craving to own such items would even snigger at the nomenclature) to be produced.

"Armored animalistic forms imbue the upper.  Hand-skived anaconda textured leather quarter panels are embellished with a debossed Vac-Tech Nike Swoosh.  The molded rear is sculpted with a reptilian-inspired spike".

And so, a star is born, an object of intense desire to be owned, and worn and paraded before those so much less fortunate than the owners who bask in the brilliance of the admiration showered upon them, as 'cool', 'with it'.  Along with the cool comes a vocabulary that barely resembles civil language in its deliberate uncouthness: "I'ma give it to you like this: The people that wear their pairs is people that wanna get fresh, they wanna look fly."

Hype works, it most certainly does.  Canadian youth lined up for hours in Ottawa and Toronto hoping to have the opportunity to shell out $299 for a pair of ridiculous, but status-conscious footwear.  Like the madness that overtook Holland when tulips were valued at an absurd price hundreds of years ago, these Nike-produced, celebrity-designed shoes are listing on eBay at $3,000 to $7,000.

But some fortunate bozo lucked in by scoring a rare black-and-ink preorder pair for only $90,000 on auction at eBay.